About Ralf Rottmann

My name is Ralf Rottmann.

I’m a serial entrepreneur who sold his last company to Alcatel-Lucent and now serves as a Partner atRottmann Willnow Ventures, my private investment and incubation vehicle.

As a Member of the Board of Directors at IOTA Foundation I help growing one of the most fascinating Distributed Ledger Technologies (“Blockchain”) of our time and support enterprises to apply it to real-world use cases.

I’m also a Managing Partner (“Geschäftsführender Gesellschafter”) at grandcentrix which I co-founded. Incorporated in 2009 with my long-term business partner in crime, Martin Willnow, grandcentrix has become Germany’s largest system integrator focussing entirely on smart connected products and the Internet of Things.

I also co-founded the inspirational fashion shopping startup AMAZE which we sold to Zalando in May 2016.

In 2010, Germany’s renowned WirtschaftsWoche put me on it’sList of Best Known Serial Entrepreneurs.

Ad a former Editor for The Next Web, one of the World’s leading Technology Blogs, I published articles with a focus on technology startups up until the end of 2008.

Prior to all of the above, I served as the Head of Information Technology at 1&1 (now United Internet) which was my last professional engagement prior to my journey as an entrepreneur.

Find me: Twitter (@ralf), LinkedIn and Facebook, where I have a combined following of roughly 90.000 technology-loving people.

I am very happily married to Jintana, who shows me that there is an awesome life beyond the screen, every single day. ;-) We live in Dortmund, North Rhine-Westphalia, the fourth greenest city with a 500k+ population in Germany.

Official bio

Ralf Rottmann is a serial entrepreneur from Germany who sold his first company to Alcatel-Lucent in 2008. He now is a Partner at Rottmann Willnow Ventures, a Member of the Board of Directors at the IOTA Foundation and a Managing Partner at grandcentrix, Germany’s leading Internet of Things integrator. With more than a decade of building and growing successful companies, Ralf focuses on IoT, Distributed Ledger Technology and strategies for the connected economy.

Testimonials

I had the pleasure to work with some brilliant folks over the years. Here is what some are saying about me. (All recommendations are also publicly available through my LinkedIn profile.)

“Ralf is an extremely gifted and visionary developer. He was essential to the success of his last two companies, and we considered him personally to be a strategic partner of Genesys. Ralf is also a well-read, enthusiastic explorer of ideas and experiences, and he easily builds rapport with all whom he meets. He is very strong in customer-facing situations, and he is equally adept at ‘delivering the goods’ – a great engineering leader!”

“Ralf is an extremely capable strategic thinker and product development/management professional. We collaborated on innovative new user applications that made complex call center functionality both easier to use and more powerful. I highly recommend Ralf for senior positions in developing advanced call center software.”

“Ralf is an outstanding strategist. He has both the ability to envision the needs of the future and the technical skills to develop the solutions. In addition to those attributes, he also has very strong communication skills to clearly get the points across to any level of audience members. His enthusiasm for his work is unparalleled and contagious. I truly have enjoyed working with him in the past and look forward to future projects that will give me the opportunity again in the future.”

“Ralf is truly a master of his domain. With his technical expertise and under his leadership, he and his team created a a product which not only enhanced our portfolio but also created new market opportunities for us. He is passionate, dedicated and a committed partner. Ralf has the perfect blend of technical expertise and business acumen. It has been an honor to have worked with Ralf in creating not only the next generation product but also a very significant and fruitful relationship.”

“I have known and worked with Ralf for many years and have found him to be exceptional in many areas. He has a unique blend of detailed technical knowledge combined with a strong business intuition. His drive and enthusiasm are infectious and he adds a degree of excitement to those around him. He is also a strong team leader and business manager that can drive toward achieving the goals of even aggressive business plans. I would strongly recommend Ralf as a key executive for companies that want to drive leading edge technology forward.”

“Ralf has worked with Genesys both as a customer and partner, not that those two are ever mutually exclusive. His technical and market knowledge, expertise and ability to use, improve upon and create and effectively demonstrate market leading, user friendly products is impressive.”

“[…] I remember Ralf very well indeed from when we were both in 1&1. Our working relationship was relatively brief… but it had a significant impact on me. I found Ralf to be knowledgeable, helpful and with a high level of integrity – and if I recall correctly, he ate all the biscuits from my office. I am so pleased Ralf is being recognized for his obvious talents and skills. This just shows there is justice in the world. Well done Ralf. One day we will meet up again. I look forward to it. My very best regards. James Stuart.”